"Are you addressing me?"
"I am, and with knobs on. Bill's never been farther east than Frinton."
"He's been to Cannes."
"Is Cannes east? I never know. But he's certainly never been within smelling distance of Indian idols' eyes."
"I didn't think of that," said Rory.
"Yes, that, I admit, does weaken my argument to a certain extent." He brooded tensely.
"Ha! I have it now. I see it all. The rift between Bill and Biggar is due to the baby."
"What on earth are you talking about? What baby?"
"Bill's, working in close collaboration with Biggar's daughter, the apple of Biggar's eye, a poor, foolish little thing who loved not wisely but too well. And if you are going to say that girls are all wise nowadays, I reply "Not one brought up in the missionary school at Squalor Lumpit". In those missionary schools they explain the facts of life by telling the kids about the bees and the flowers till the poor little brutes don't know which is which."
"For heaven's sake, Rory."
"Mark how it works out with the inevitability of Greek tragedy or whatever it was that was so bally inevitable. Girl comes to England, no mother to guide her, meets a handsome young Englishman, and what happens? The first false step.
The remorse ... too late. The little bundle.
The awkward interview with Father. Father all steamed up. Curses a bit in some native dialect and packs his elephant gun and comes along to see old Bill. "Caramba!" as that Spaniard is probably saying at this moment on the television screen. Still, there's nothing to worry about. I don't suppose he can make him marry her. All Bill will have to do is look after the little thing's education. Send it to school and so on. If a boy, Eton. If a girl, Roedean."
"Cheltenham."
"Oh, yes. I'd forgotten you were an Old Cheltonian. The question now arises, should young Jill be told? It hardly seems fair to allow her to rush unwarned into marriage with a ripsnorting rou`e like William, Earl of Rowcester."
"Don't call Bill a ripsnorting rou`e!"
"It is how we should describe him at Harrige's."
"As a matter of fact, you're probably all wrong about Bill and Biggar. I know the poor boy's jumpy, but most likely it hasn't anything to do with Captain Biggar at all. It's because he's all on edge, wondering if Mrs. Spottsworth is going to buy the house. In which connection, Rory, you old fathead, can't you do something to help the thing along instead of bunging a series of spanners into the works?"
"I don't get your drift."
"I will continue snowing. Ever since Mrs.
Spottsworth arrived, you've been doing nothing but point out Rowcester Abbey's defects. Be constructive."
"In what way, my queen?"
"Well, draw her attention to some of the good things there are in the place."
Rory nodded dutifully, but dubiously.
"I'll do my best," he said. "But I shall have very little raw material to work with. And now, old girl, I imagine that Spaniard will have blown over by this time, so let us rejoin the Derby diners.
For some reason or other—why, one cannot tell—
I've got a liking for a beast called Oratory."
Mrs. Spottsworth had left the ruined chapel. After a vigil of some twenty-five minutes she had wearied of waiting for Lady Agatha to manifest herself. Like many very rich women, she tended to be impatient and to demand quick service. When in the mood for spectres, she wanted them hot off the griddle. Returning to the garden, she had found a rustic seat and was sitting there smoking a cigarette and enjoying the beauty of the night.
It was one of those lovely nights which occur from time to time in an English June, mitigating the rigours of the island summer and causing manufacturers of raincoats and umbrellas to wonder uneasily if they have been mistaken in supposing England to be an earthly Paradise for men of their profession.
A silver moon was riding in the sky, and a gentle breeze blew from the west, bringing with it the heart-stirring scent of stock and tobacco plant.
Shy creatures of the night rustled in the bushes at her side and, to top the whole thing off, somewhere in the woods beyond the river a nightingale had begun to sing with the full-throated zest of a bird conscious of having had a rave notice from the poet Keats and only a couple of nights ago a star spot on the programme of the B.b.c.
It was a night made for romance, and Mrs.
Spottsworth recognized it as such. Although in her vers libre days in Greenwich Village she had gone in almost exclusively for starkness and squalor, even then she had been at heart a sentimentalist. Left to herself, she would have turned out stuff full of moons, Junes, loves, doves, blisses and kisses. It was simply that the editors of the poetry magazines seemed to prefer rat-ridden tenements, the smell of cooking cabbage, and despair, and a girl had to eat.
Fixed now as solidly financially as any woman in America and freed from the necessity of truckling to the tastes of editors, she was able to take the wraps off her romantic self, and as she sat on the rustic seat, looking at the moon and listening to the nightingale, a stylist like the late Gustave Flaubert, tireless in his quest of the mot juste, would have had no hesitation in describing her mood as mushy.
To this mushiness Captain Biggar's conversation at dinner had contributed largely. We have given some indication of its trend, showing it ranging freely from cannibal chiefs to dart-blowing head-hunters, from head-hunters to alligators, and its effect on Mrs. Spottsworth had been very similar to that of Othello's reminiscences on Desdemona. In short, long before the last strawberry had been eaten, the final nut consumed, she was convinced that this was the mate for her and resolved to spare no effort in pushing the thing along. In the matter of marrying again, both A. B. Spottsworth and Clifton Bessemer had given her the green light, and there was consequently no obstacle in her path.
There appeared, however, to be one in the path leading to the rustic seat, for at this moment there floated to her through the silent night the sound of a strong man tripping over a flower-pot. It was followed by some pungent remarks in Swahili, and Captain Biggar limped up, rubbing his shin.
Mrs. Spottsworth was all womanly sympathy.
"Oh, dear. Have you hurt yourself, Captain?"
"A mere scratch, dear lady," he assured her.
He spoke bluffly, and only somebody like Sherlock Holmes or Monsieur Poirot could have divined that at the sound of her voice his soul had turned a double somersault leaving him quivering with an almost Bill Rowcester-like intensity.
His telephone conversation concluded, the White Hunter had prudently decided to avoid the living-room and head straight for the great open spaces, where he could be alone. To join the ladies, he had reasoned, would be to subject himself to the searing torture of having to sit and gaze at the woman he worshipped, a process which would simply rub in the fact of how unattainable she was. He recognized himself as being in the unfortunate position of the moth in Shelley's well-known poem that allowed itself to become attracted by a star, and it seemed to him that the smartest move a level-headed moth could make would be to minimize the anguish by shunning the adored object's society. It was, he felt, what Shelley would have advised.
And here he was, alone with her in the night, a night complete with moonlight, nightingales, gentle breezes and the scent of stock and tobacco plant.
It was a taut, tense Captain Biggar, a Captain Biggar telling himself he must be strong, who accepted his companion's invitation to join her on the rustic seat. The voices of Tubby Frobisher and the Subahdar seemed to ring in his ears. "Chin up, old boy," said Tubby in his right ear. "Remember the code," said the Subahdar in his left.
He braced himself for the coming t@ete-@a-t@ete.
Mrs. Spottsworth, a capital conversationalist, began it by saying what a beautiful night it was, to which the Captain replied "Top hole". "The moon", said Mrs.